Making Special
Making special is Ellen Dissanayake's defining concept: the universal, biologically grounded human impulse to take something ordinary — a tool, a surface, a sound, a movement, a moment — and transform it through deliberate effort into something that commands attention. Across every culture ever documented, from Aboriginal body painting to medieval illuminated manuscripts, humans invest costly effort in elaboration beyond functional requirement. The behavior is universal, ancient, and expensive — three features that, in evolutionary terms, almost certainly indicate an adaptation selected for its survival value. Making special strengthens social bonds, marks transitions, and signals reliable investment between partners. It is not a luxury available after survival is secured; it is part of how the species survives.
In the AI Story
Dissanayake arrived at making special through four decades of fieldwork in Sri Lanka, Papua New Guinea, Nigeria, and India — non-Western societies far from the gallery-and-museum framework that dominates Western aesthetics. What she found was that the Western fine-art tradition had obscured rather than revealed the phenomenon of art. The concept of art as the province of individual genius, displayed in institutions, assessed by educated elites, is a recent and local development. The deeper behavior — the impulse to make things more than they need to be — is found in every human society, including societies with no concept of 'art' as a separate category.
The term is deliberately plain, almost deflationary, because Dissanayake wanted to strip away the accumulated aesthetic theory that had buried the phenomenon. Making special is not about beauty, originality, or expressive genius. It is about the deliberate investment of effort in elaboration beyond function. The cave painter at Chauvet, the Scandinavian carver working on a courting spoon, the three-year-old applying excessive glitter to a birthday card — all are performing the same behavior in different media.
The five proto-aesthetic operations through which making special is performed — formalization, repetition, exaggeration, elaboration, and manipulation of expectation — appear consistently across cultures and developmental stages. They are the biological grammar of making special. Critically, AI can perform all five operations at the level of formal output; what it cannot do is perform the underlying behavior of costly elaboration by a being with stakes in the outcome.
Origin
Dissanayake introduced the concept in her 1988 book What Is Art For? and developed it across subsequent works including Homo Aestheticus (1992) and Art and Intimacy (2000). Her ethnographic immersion in subsistence cultures that lacked Western art institutions forced her to abandon the dominant aesthetic frameworks and search for what art actually is at the species level.
The concept's power lies in its reframing of art as a behavior rather than an object — a verb rather than a noun. This reframing, discussed fully in Art Is a Verb, transforms every question about AI-generated art, because it relocates the inquiry from what the machine produces to what the human is or is not doing.
Key Ideas
Universal. Every known human society practices making special, in forms that vary wildly but converge on the same underlying structure.
Ancient. The ochre marks at Blombos Cave date to approximately one hundred thousand years ago, placing the behavior at least as old as symbolic thought itself.
Costly. Making special consumes time, energy, and materials that could be directed toward activities with more immediate survival payoffs — which is why, in Zahavian terms, it functions as a reliable signal.
Behavioral, not formal. The adaptive value resides in the doing, not the done. The object is a byproduct; the behavior is the adaptation.
Directed. Making special is always made for someone — the mutuality is constitutive of the behavior, not decorative.
Debates & Critiques
The sharpest debates around making special concern its boundaries and its application to AI-generated output. Critics argue the concept is too broad, collapsing distinctions between high art and decoration. Dissanayake's response is that the collapse is precisely the point: the Western separation of 'fine art' from craft, decoration, and everyday elaboration obscures the underlying behavior. A more substantive debate concerns whether AI output can count as making special. Dissanayake's framework suggests it cannot — not because the output lacks formal quality but because the machine lacks stakes, effort, and the capacity for directed care. The human who elaborates AI output through genuine engagement is making special; the machine is not.
Appears in the Orange Pill Cycle
Further reading
- Ellen Dissanayake, What Is Art For? (University of Washington Press, 1988)
- Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (Free Press, 1992)
- Ellen Dissanayake, Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (University of Washington Press, 2000)
- Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind (Doubleday, 2000)
- Denis Dutton, The Art Instinct (Bloomsbury Press, 2009)